How Congress Assigns Federal Court Jurisdiction

Congress assigns federal court jurisdiction by statute, drawing on four main bases: geography, subject matter, the identity of the parties, and specific procedural mechanisms like removal and supplemental jurisdiction. It can do so because Article III creates only the Supreme Court directly and leaves every other federal court, and the scope of every court’s docket, to legislation. Congress works within the outer ceiling Article III sets, but it has never granted the federal courts the full reach that ceiling would allow.

Where the Power Comes From

Article III, Section 1 vests the judicial power in “one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.”¹ Article I, Section 8 separately authorizes Congress to “constitute Tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court.”² Every federal court besides the Supreme Court exists because Congress chose to create it, and the cases it may hear are the cases Congress has written into statute.

Article III, Section 2 sets the ceiling. The federal judicial power may reach cases arising under the Constitution, federal laws, and treaties; cases involving ambassadors and public ministers; admiralty and maritime matters; cases where the United States is a party; disputes between states; and cases between citizens of different states, among others.³ Congress is not required to fill the ceiling. In Sheldon v. Sill (1850), the Supreme Court held that Congress is “not bound to enlarge the jurisdiction of the Federal courts to every subject which the Constitution might warrant,” and that “courts created by statute can have no jurisdiction but such as the statute confers.”⁴ In practice Congress has consistently granted less than Article III would allow.⁵

Geography: Districts and Circuits

The most visible way Congress organizes the federal courts is by geography. There are 94 federal judicial districts, with at least one in every state plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands.⁶ Larger states are split into multiple districts; New York has four. Those districts are grouped into 12 regional circuits, each served by a court of appeals that reviews decisions from the district courts within it.⁷ A thirteenth appellate court, the Federal Circuit, breaks the geographic pattern and takes nationwide jurisdiction over specialized matters like patent appeals and appeals from the Court of International Trade and the Court of Federal Claims.⁸

This structure traces to the Judiciary Act of 1789, which divided the country into 13 districts and three circuits, and to the Evarts Act of 1891, which created a dedicated court of appeals in each then-existing circuit.⁹¹⁰

Subject Matter: What the Case Is About

Federal courts are courts of limited jurisdiction. They can hear only cases that fall within categories Congress has authorized by statute.¹¹ Two statutes do most of the work.

Federal Question Jurisdiction

Under 28 U.S.C. § 1331, district courts have original jurisdiction over “all civil actions arising under the Constitution, laws, or treaties of the United States.”¹² This authority arrived in stages. The 1789 act gave only limited federal question jurisdiction. A short-lived 1801 statute granted it generally, was repealed the next year, and general federal question jurisdiction did not become permanent until the Jurisdiction and Removal Act of 1875.¹³ Congress eliminated the amount-in-controversy requirement for § 1331 claims against the United States and its officers in 1976 and struck the threshold entirely in 1980.

The Supreme Court reads the statutory phrase “arising under” more narrowly than the constitutional grant. Under the well-pleaded complaint rule, the federal question must appear on the face of the plaintiff’s complaint, not simply as a defense the defendant plans to raise.¹⁴

Diversity Jurisdiction

Under 28 U.S.C. § 1332, federal courts can hear disputes between citizens of different states when the amount in controversy exceeds $75,000.¹⁵ The complete-diversity rule from Strawbridge v. Curtiss (1806) generally requires that no plaintiff share state citizenship with any defendant. Congress has raised the dollar threshold seven times since 1789, from $500 in the original Judiciary Act up to the current $75,000 set in 1996, using the figure to calibrate how much of the civil docket federal courts carry.¹⁶

Class actions follow a different rule. The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 requires only minimal diversity, meaning any one plaintiff must be a citizen of a different state from any defendant, and the aggregate amount in controversy must exceed $5 million.¹⁷

Who the Parties Are

Congress also assigns jurisdiction based on the identity of the parties. Article III itself singles out cases involving ambassadors and foreign ministers, controversies where the United States is a party, disputes between states, and suits between a state and citizens of another state or a foreign country.¹⁸ Congress has implemented those grants through statutes covering suits by or against the federal government, suits by foreign diplomats, and interstate disputes. Under 28 U.S.C. § 1251, Congress has made the Supreme Court’s original jurisdiction exclusive only for controversies between two or more states; the other categories are shared with lower federal courts.¹⁹

Exclusive or Shared With State Courts

A separate question is whether a grant of federal jurisdiction is exclusive or concurrent with state courts. The default is concurrency: state courts can hear federal claims unless Congress has confined jurisdiction to the federal system.²⁰ Congress has made federal jurisdiction exclusive in several important areas, including bankruptcy proceedings under 28 U.S.C. § 1334, federal criminal prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. § 3231, and antitrust cases under 28 U.S.C. § 1337.⁵

Where jurisdiction is concurrent, state courts generally cannot refuse federal claims on policy grounds. The Supreme Court held in Testa v. Katt (1947) that states may not decline federal claims because they disagree with the federal law at issue, though they can apply neutral procedural rules.²⁰

Removal: Shifting a Case Out of State Court

Congress has assigned another slice of federal jurisdiction through removal. The general removal statute, 28 U.S.C. § 1441, lets a defendant sued in state court transfer the case to federal court when the federal court would have had original jurisdiction.²¹ Separate statutes authorize removal for suits against federal officers or agencies (§ 1442), civil rights cases (§ 1443), bankruptcy-related claims (§ 1452), class actions (§ 1453), and patent and copyright cases (§ 1454).²²

Removal is nearly as old as the federal courts themselves. The 1789 act allowed defendants to remove diversity cases from state to federal court when more than $500 was at stake.⁹ Reconstruction-era statutes like the Separable Controversy Act of 1866 and the Local Prejudice Act of 1867 expanded removal to protect parties from potential bias in state courts.¹³ A 1948 revision dropped provisions allowing removal on grounds of “prejudice or local influence” that had been born of Civil War tensions.²¹

Supplemental Jurisdiction

In 1990, Congress codified supplemental jurisdiction in 28 U.S.C. § 1367, letting federal courts hear state-law claims that are part of the same case or controversy as a properly filed federal claim.²³ The statute was a direct response to Finley v. United States (1989), in which the Supreme Court declined to read existing jurisdictional statutes broadly enough to support pendent party jurisdiction without explicit authorization. If a federal court has original jurisdiction over at least one claim, it can hear related state-law claims that share a “common nucleus of operative fact,” though § 1367 also lets courts decline supplemental jurisdiction when a state-law claim raises a novel or complex issue or when the federal claims have been dismissed.

Specialized Courts

Congress has also carved out jurisdiction by creating specialized courts whose dockets are defined by subject matter rather than geography. Some are Article III courts whose judges have life tenure, like the Court of International Trade (which has exclusive jurisdiction over civil actions involving international trade laws) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, authorized in 1978 to issue warrants for intelligence activities.²⁴ Others are Article I legislative courts whose judges serve fixed terms, including the U.S. Tax Court, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces.²⁵

The structural difference matters. Article III judges hold office during “good behaviour” with protected salaries and must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate; Article I judges lack those protections.²⁶ The Supreme Court has held that Article I courts may constitutionally adjudicate “public rights” disputes between the government and private parties, but that private-rights disputes generally require an Article III forum.²⁷ That constitutional line limits how far Congress can push subject-matter work into Article I tribunals.

Appellate Jurisdiction and the Exceptions Clause

Congress also controls how cases move up through the system. Article III grants the Supreme Court appellate jurisdiction over most federal cases but makes it subject to “such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.” Congress has used that clause both to shape the Court’s docket and, at times, to withdraw jurisdiction entirely. In Ex parte McCardle (1869), Congress repealed the statute authorizing Supreme Court appeals in certain habeas corpus cases while a case was pending, specifically to prevent a ruling on Reconstruction legislation; the Court upheld the repeal, saying it was “not at liberty to inquire into the motives of the legislature.”²⁸

The power has outer limits. In United States v. Klein (1871), the Court struck down a statute that tried to dictate the outcome of pending litigation, treating it as an invasion of judicial independence.²⁹ In Boumediene v. Bush (2008), the Court struck down a jurisdictional limitation because it amounted to an unconstitutional suspension of habeas corpus.²⁸ On the regulatory side, legislation in 1891 and again in 1988 replaced most mandatory direct appeals with discretionary review by writ of certiorari, giving the Court far greater control over which cases it hears.³⁰

Expansion and Contraction Over Time

The pattern across two centuries is one of continual congressional adjustment. The 1789 act built a modest federal system that left most cases to state courts. Reconstruction brought expansion: the Civil Rights Act of 1866 gave district courts exclusive criminal jurisdiction over its violations, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1867 opened federal courts as a post-conviction remedy for state prisoners, and the Civil Rights Act of 1871 created what is now 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the basis for suing state and local officials in federal court for constitutional violations.¹³

Congress has also pulled jurisdiction back. The Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932 limited federal courts’ power to issue injunctions in labor disputes, a restriction the Supreme Court upheld in Lauf v. E.G. Shinner & Co. (1938). The Emergency Price Control Act of 1942 channeled challenges to wartime price regulations into a special court and barred district courts from hearing them. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 funneled certain litigation exclusively to the federal court in the District of Columbia, a structure the Court approved in South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966).³¹

Each episode reflects the same arrangement that has governed since 1789. Congress decides which doors to the federal courthouse are open and which are closed, within the ceiling Article III sets and subject to constitutional limits like habeas corpus, due process, and the separation of powers.

1
Congress.gov. Article III of the U.S. Constitution
2
Congress.gov. Article III Courts and the Establishment of Inferior Courts
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4
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U.S. District Court, District of Kansas. What Kinds of Cases Belong in Federal Court
12
Cornell Law Institute. 28 U.S.C. § 1331
13
Federal Judicial Center. Federal Judicial Power: Jurisdiction
14
Congress.gov. Federal Question Jurisdiction Under 28 U.S.C. § 1331
15
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 U.S.C. § 1332
16
Federal Judicial Center. Jurisdiction: Diversity
17
Congress.gov. Diversity Jurisdiction Requirements
18
Congress.gov. Controversies to Which the United States Is a Party
19
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 U.S.C. § 1251
20
Congress.gov. Exclusive and Concurrent Federal Jurisdiction
21
Cornell Law Institute. 28 U.S.C. § 1441
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Congress.gov. Removal Jurisdiction
23
Cornell Law Institute. 28 U.S.C. § 1367
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Congress.gov. Specialized Article III Courts
25
FDLP LibGuides. U.S. Federal Courts: Special Courts
26
Congress.gov. Article I Legislative Courts
27
Cornell Law Institute. Legislative Courts: Adjudicating Public Rights
28
Congress.gov. The Exceptions Clause and Congressional Control
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Cornell Law Institute. Exceptions Clause and Congressional Control Over Appellate Jurisdiction
30
Congress.gov. Original and Appellate Jurisdiction of the Supreme Court
31
Justia. The Theory of Plenary Congressional Control